Tessa Hadley asks what happens when we are alone with a book

With Alone with a Book, Tessa Hadley moves into nonfiction for the first time and gathers reflections shaped by a lifetime of reading. Announced by Penguin for 5 November, the collection traces a path from a childhood among libraries and imaginary worlds, through years of teaching and writing, to an adult way of looking at art. Its essays consider very different writers, from George Eliot and George Saunders to Tolstoy and Elizabeth Bowen, alongside a small group of paintings examined closely. The connecting thread is not a fixed canon but attention itself: deep reading as a practice that can alter how we see texts, images and ourselves. It is a book about reading that avoids becoming a handbook, choosing lived experience instead.